


Return to Gravity Falls ‹ 1 ›

by cinnamxn



Series: 'Return' Series [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Early Mid-Life Crisis, Fresh Start, Gen, Hallucinations, I'm Bad at Beginnings, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Childhood Trauma, Impulsive Decisions, Missing Persons, Mystery, Next-Gen OC(s), Nightmares, Nostalgia, Paranormal Investigator Dipper Pines, recreational alcohol use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-21 18:06:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11949753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinnamxn/pseuds/cinnamxn
Summary: Things just aren't working out the way they are. That's why Dipper needs a change of scene.He tells himself Gravity Falls is the best choice





	Return to Gravity Falls ‹ 1 ›

_A poster is stapled to the door of the Mystery Shack when he finally gets home. "MISSING" it says, and suddenly he's crying._

_\-- Dipper comes home_

 

  
**PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA**  
**APRIL 2, 2022**

The source of the steam is a white mug, featuring two small cartoons wondering through pines. One, a boy, has a tracker hat on his head and a book in his hand. The other, a girl, points some kind of gun ahead, she wears a faceless sweater. Between them, their hands are linked. Dipper reaches for the mug, its rims browned from constant use, and he overpowers the hot water with the cool silkiness of whole milk. The mug is an ancient present from his sister, from when they were fourteen.

At 2:26am with the windows open, a chill creeps up Dipper's spine. As he brings the hot drink to his lips, so, too, does he pull his hat down over his face. The fur lining is an immediate comfort; worn into the shape of his head by now. He is certain he will never rid himself of hat hair, but neither does he plan to rid himself of the hat.

The coffee has a sharp taste, since Dipper's sugar supply has been depleted, and he twists his lips before swallowing. Warmth slides down his throat and pools in his belly. He approaches his desk and takes another small sip. Again, it soothes him from the inside.

By the time his butt is in the wooden chair, the coffee has liberated him. His limbs start to cooperate, and although his vision still bends, blurs and bruises in his fatigue, it is leagues better than the droopy-eyed near-sleep of before.

He sits at his desk in the dark, turns the lamp on, grabs a pen and unlocks the bottom drawer of a metal cabinet. Restricting himself to the small circle of light, he retrieves two blue journals from within and slams the drawer closed. One of them is filled from start to finish with page-after-page of mystery and anomaly: mementos, sketches and photos. It's caught in an awkward limbo between scientific journal and scrapbook. The second one is only recent, with less than a dozen pages of writing; not a single photo to be seen.

Dipper opens to the first page of the first journal, seeing photographs taken during his time in Gravity Falls. Gravity Falls: the place where everything started. No other place in America can compare to Gravity Falls -- maybe not even any other place in the world can. The mere knowledge of such a place always throws Dipper a bit off kilter: that such madness is reality, and that it exists in such an unlikely place. Gravity Falls is just a small town in Oregon with a lot of wacky, secluded folk and weird traditions.

Maybe, it's the perfect place for the supernatural to take root in.

Ten years ago in Gravity Falls, Dipper found a journal, one which illustrated all the paranormal things going on within the town. It was covered with a bold "3" and the author's name had been torn out in an attempt to detach him from his family. Thereby, the author saved his family from the dangers inked in the books. Dipper became obsessed with the contents of the book, and as a result, a fanboy of the author. He had wanted nothing more than to be like him, and still follows in the footsteps of the author.

In fact, the journal he owns is a clear replica of the one he found all those years ago: the journal written by none other than his great uncle: Stanford Pines.

Ford's journals were bound with maroon leather and golden bands around the spine. There was a paper cutout of a six-fingered hand glued to the cover in that same golden hue. It was on the metallic paper that the numbers ordering the books were written. Altogether, there were 3, and Dipper had found the final. Three words in that book struck him hardest, and perhaps still contribute to his social hang-ups.

**TRUST NO ONE.**

Even years later, he cannot help but look over his shoulder. But nothing is out of place. Darkness creeps into the kitchen, and the small set of cushioned chairs he calls a living room. His letters from yesterday are on the floor beside him, because he's too weary to get his hopes up on mysteries that are probably just huge April Fools pranks. Trust no one, Ford had written, and Dipper never forgot.

The cards are filled with nothing but fool's gold. They are not to be trusted.

His gaze lingers on the stack for a moment, hoping beyond hope that maybe one contains a serious investigation, but he knows it is fruitless. A business like his is a joke, and not even a good one -- a tacky, overused, April Fools prank. He forces himself to look away, and finds himself again at his own journal, filled with the failings of a career.

Despite his feelings towards others' intentions, Dipper's journals aren't alike to Ford's in their tone. His book is the same as Ford's in its design. A blue, leather-life cover, filled with pages upon pages and containing a silver tree-shaped sticker on its front. At the time he designed it, ten years earlier, Dipper had thought it a genius design. Being an adult who endured high school art class and maturity in general, he sees it as quite silly, but sentimentally refuses to abandon the general design.

Their tone is quite different. The first of his journals is nostalgic. Photos and memories stain the pages and looking through Dipper can never help but give a wry smile. The second is dejected. It is mostly empty, and those words which do appear on the pages often seem to tell more of failure than discovery or success.

Forcing his self to drop the over-thinking, he flips the pages of his first journal until he finds a cluster of pages focused on ghosts.

Ghosts are his most common encounter since leaving Gravity Falls; he is beginning to accept that they are a global weirdness, which is why he opens the book to that page. In the corner of a page listing the defining factors of the different categories of ghost, he reads one of many footnotes:

 **Ghosts are a global phenomenon.**  
**No matter where you go you can find them.**  
**They are just as common in Europe or Asia**  
**as they are in the weirdest parts of Gravity Falls.**

Scratching the hair on his chin, Dipper considers whether or not he has more to write on currently the only creature not confined to Gravity Falls. He withdraws his hands from his face, opting to manage his jitters by chewing on a pen instead; something that comes much more naturally as an age-old habit. To emphasize the importance of the note, he eventually scratches a red circle around the text. It's all he has to add to the book.

"I'm so sick of ghosts," he sighs. He wonders where the hard ones are: the magic, the demons, the invisible wizards. In the time since he set up his site, all he can get are ghosts, and that is if he's lucky. Sometimes, it's just a paranoid old woman who is lonely after her child's death, or a woman who thinks "Mystery Hunter Pines" is a private investigator who will stalk her husband for her.

He took both cases anyway; he needed the money.

Dipper hears someone ask him, "What are you doing awake?"

And he responds automatically. "Bad dream."

Once he has done it, he puzzles it over for a minute. He glances around his apartment, dull and dark, and finds nobody but himself, and his fish. If you could all Axel a fish. He shrugs it off. It's not the first time it's happened, either. He must be so lonely even the ghosts are taking pity on him.

Dipper has been experiencing the same bad dream for several nights. He wants to talk about it; to tell Mabel. It's too late (or, perhaps, too early) to call her, so he stares at a picture in his journal instead, wondering why it's so hard to talk to her about these things anymore.

  
\--/u\\--

  
_He is at the beach, enjoying himself, Mabel is nearby. He smiles at her; she smiles back. Of course, Mabel brought along her boy-of-the-month. His face, name and personality never really matters, it is just another guy Mabel likes, who she will forget about in due time. A boat starts to approach the beach from the horizon, and they all run out to the water._

_"Grunkle Stan! Grunkle Ford!" one of them, maybe both twins, shouts. Mabel slowsbefore she touches the waves, but Dipper doesn't, not even when he is submerged in the freezing water._

_From out of the water a pyramid rises, yellow and glowing, just like the monster in all of Dipper's nightmares. High pitched laughter pounds his eardrums, and then the eye turns into a mouth, and it swallows his great uncles. Not whole, though; no. Dipper witnesses every gory detail, unable to intervene as they are crushed._

_Mabel cries, and rushes forward into the water, but the boy with her holds her back. Dipper freezes; panics. Too shocked to swim, the tide drags him under, and he looks up, facing a sunset between the masts of two yachts._

_Triangular, and rose-stained._

_**Sixty degrees that come in threes,** _  
_**Watches from within birch trees,** _  
_**Saw his own dimension burn,** _  
_**Misses home and can't return,** _  
_**Says he's happy; he's a liar,** _  
_**Blame the arson for the fire.** _  
_**If he wants to shirk the blame,** _  
_**he'll have to invoke my name.** _  
_**One way to absolve his crime:** _  
_**A different form, a different time.** _

  
\--/u\\--

  
Dipper wakes from the nightmare gracefully. His body is sticky with sweat, and his heart hammers against his chest, but the opening of his eyes is slow and steady, as he comes to understand the unreality of what he witnessed... again. Two times in one night, the same dream. He can not even remember sleeping, but he finds a half-finished, cold coffee and an open journal still on the desk. The journal is opened to a picture of him and Mabel, in Gravity Falls for the second summer.

Dipper's face in the photo is covered with acne, but Mabel still presses her cheek against his, holding him close for a selfie. She wears a bright yellow bow in her hair, and is sporting her second ear piercings; they're yellow, spiky balls, and her sweater is neon pink. Dipper's t-shirt has a UFO on it. He sits back, closes the book, and he sighs.

He is in a tiny apartment in Piedmont, California. With a touch of rue, he thinks, Gravity Falls is miles away.

He still misses it.

The red lines on his digital clock tell him that he has slept for around four hours, and the view outside his apartment window confirms that four hours is just long enough to reach sunrise.

He thinks about calling Mabel to make sure she is okay, but knows the party animal is probably hung-over from some crazy college rave, let alone asleep. Instead, he shoots her a quick text about all the mail he got the day before. Dipper stretches his arms before standing from the chair. He feeds his fish a few pellets of food, and then begins soothing his unease with a glass of chocolate milk (shockingly good despite the date on the plastic).

He does not change or shower. When he finally recovers from the shock of the nightmare, he goes immediately to the door in his dirty clothes, intending to dirty them further with a large dose of sweat from a morning jog.

Nightmares are not unusual to Dipper. Ever since Gravity Falls and all the crazy things he had seen there, his mind became stuck in the dreadful. Especially since he had been haunted by a floating triangle and countless other oddities, he tends to have wild and outlandish dreams of the weirdest kind. When, four months ago, his great uncles disappeared... well that only added fuel to the fire.

The morning walks are a habit he developed to manage the stress those nightmares give him, since it is the quickest way to wind down his adrenaline levels. Only this time, something stops him before he opens the door.

An envelope of white, the lip held down by a blue sticker shaped like a pine tree. It's on top of the Fools' Gold pile of letters. Dipper's website and YouCast has a few fans, and the pine tree has been the logo of "Mystery Hunter Pines" ever since he created the one-man business, so at first he assumes it is just another of those stupid Fools' Gold letters made to look pretty, but the number "1" in marker on top of the sticker makes him second guess himself.

It's something small, meaningless. But it also suggests that there will be multiple letters. It may even be an offset of how he and Stanford numbered their books, but that's a bit too much of a conspiracy for now. Either way, the mysterious envelope intrigues him in a way he hasn't felt for over nine years.

When he opens the envelope, and finds a message written on the back of a Gravity Falls postcard, things get weird.

Things always get weird when Gravity Falls is involved.

Any intentions of going for a walk are dropped instantly; Dipper starts packing. In a place where fools and gold reign supreme, Fools' Gold may be a profitable business.

 

\--/u\\--

 

 **SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA**  
**APRIL 2, 2022**

 

Mabel Pines lays against a neon beanbag, head pounding — a hangover. A box set TV with a grainy image plays before her, the scratchy audio doing wonders to make her head hurt further. She must have had someone over.

Attempting to smooth an unruly mess of brown tangles, Mabel reaches a tired hand for the glass of water beside her, and receives a comforting nudge from soft, wet flesh.

"Morning, Waddles," she croaks, grinning at the beastly pet. In only ten years, Waddles has become at least twice her weight, and as much a bother to the landlord as Mabel's wilder nature. 

A snort greets her, and the pig takes a step closer, knocking over the glass entirely. Mabel sighs. Too tired to get up for the remote or a new glass, she stares dead at the morning news. 

Man, why is the news always such a bummer? 

Then it happens: the news that shakes Mabel right to her core. She's sobered instantly, although her headache only worsens. leaning towards the coffee table she makes a grab for the remote and turns up the cracking set. Around her, the world shatters.

The bodies of two elderly men have been found washed up on a beach in Oregon. 

**Author's Note:**

> A great deal of the style was due to the influence of [yoursatanboyfriend](archiveofourown.org/pseuds/yoursatanboyfriend). Until I found "The Ninth Paradigm" I struggled to get the story right. First I took the idea of writing in present tense, then I took the chapter intros, which in this book, mostly fill in past events.


End file.
